Can we finally write off neoliberalism as a bad idea? Due to alterations in how the World Bank calculates wealth China is set to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy this year. Previous predictions imagined China overtaking the US in the next decade. While America’s once robust middle class shrivels and opportunity [...]

The ill effects of free trade have become abundantly obvious to most Americans. Our manufacturing base has dissipated as corporations raced overseas to find the most depraved hell holes where workers rights and environmental regulation only exist on paper, if even there. The free trade push betrayed centuries of American values and planning which built [...]

Jim Yong Kim, the new President of the World Bank, called on the world to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a shift for an organization that usually does not weigh in on the subject. Kim’s report, “Why a 4° Centigrade Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” has a very specific intent. “It is my hope that this report shocks us into action,” Kim writes in the foreward.

Form held today, as the US choice for President of the World Bank was formally adopted as the new leader. In a vote of member states, Dr. Jim Yong Kim won election to the Presidency, beating out his chief rival, Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director. Dr. Kim, 52, will take over [...]

Earlier this week I chronicled the backlash against Jim Yong Kim, President Obama’s nominee to run the World Bank. That has continued, including a critique from a close pal of Larry Summers: Larry Summers has been unnaturally silent on President Obama’s surprise decision to pass him over for the World Bank presidency in favor of [...]

The backlash against Jim Yong Kim, President Obama’s choice for the World Bank, has begun. A couple pieces in the Financial Times make the case. One, from Ed Luce, at least has some merit. Luce argues that the selection was a break from the past, but not enough of a break, because truly, the US [...]

In that rarest of Washington events, a surprise choice, President Obama will nominate Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head up the World Bank. After confirming that there is, in fact, a Jim Yong Kim and this is not Larry Summers in disguise (“Barry Mummers” would have been too on the nose), I looked [...]

The Obama Administration has until Friday to name a successor to Robert Zoellick on the World Bank. Since the end of World War II, the United States has held this selection privilege. And every time, they have selected an American for the position. This year, that has received some pushback. Other countries have forwarded their [...]

You just can’t get rid of zombie Larry Summers. He can get drummed out of Harvard. He can see the deregulation policies he pushed in the Clinton Administration lead to a financial meltdown. He can preside over a sluggish economy for two years during the Obama Administration, after which Congress flips to the opposition. And [...]

This could be the best news I’ve heard about the Obama Administration in a while. It seems that the President of the World Bank is mad at them. In an address to be delivered at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva on Monday, Zoellick cites the United States by name as “dumbing down” the [...]